Veteran CPI(M) leader and chairman of Administrative Reforms Committee V.S. Achuthanandan has urged the government to bring in regulations on eBird, a mobile application linked to an electronic database on bird sightings.
A press note quoting him said eBird was exporting highly sensitive data on the rich biodiversity of Kerala to servers located in the US. The Forest Department, he alleged, had permitted the Department of Wildlife Science under Kerala Agricultural University to upload the data without the consent of the Central government or entering into a legal agreement for the purpose.
Mr. Achuthanandan said the application was exporting data on the State’s protected areas, national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, with geographical coordinates. “eBird is not a survey instrument, it is a digital database. As the server is located in the US, it is not bound by Indian laws. The information collected by birdwatchers here is uploaded real time to the foreign server without any monitoring by the government,” he said.
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This, he pointed out, violated the guidelines laid down by the Central government, under which data sharing was to be routed only through the Open Government Data (OGD) Platform India.
'Formulate regulation policy'
Mr. Achuthanandan urged the government to formulate a policy for regulation of eBird and bring it within the ambit of Indian laws and the Right to Information Act. He demanded laws to prohibit the use of eBird for surveys conducted by government institutions.
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